Spaceforce: Rogue Universe (PC)

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• My rating: 0 stars

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• 2 stars

  A wasted opportunity. "It could have been a champion."

  by versim on June 13, 2007

  Pros: Amazing potential

  Cons: Provox hired a incompetent and zero-experience novice to do the high-level game design, destroying the game in the process.

  Summary: It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went ...

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  Summary: It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.
  
  The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious.
  
  One reason for this is that it's trying to be like Freelancer, but it's trying to avoid being identical to Freelancer. So for example you cannot set waypoints or ride in tradelanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.
  
  It's difficult to believe that the game was betatested before it was released. The assumption would be that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly underqualified and incompetent.
  
  They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:
  
  Mission 1:
  Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
  Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)
  
  Mission 2:
  Perform a dogfight against one ship.
  
  Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)
  
  There's no tutorial of any kind, and learning how to deal with the command interface is awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.
  
  There are some RPG-like elements, like you can produce new objects from mined/looted base materials. This would be cool, but it seems rather thrown in as an afterthought, and the items themselves are rather minor upgrades, which don't get more interesting as the game progresses.
  
  Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.
  
  The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)
  
  From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.
  
  But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.
  
  Do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how bad it is.

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